Todd: Of course, one can placate the people with bread and money, but only for a while. Revolutions usually erupt during phases of cultural growth and economic downturn. For me, as a demographer, the key variable is not the per capita gross domestic product but the literacy rate. The British historian Lawrence Stone pointed out this relationship in his study of the English revolution in the 16th and 17th centuries. He saw the critical threshold at 40 to 60 percent.

SPIEGEL: Well, most young Arabs can now read and write, but how is the birth rate actually developing? The population in Arab countries is extremely young, with half of its citizens younger than 25.

Todd: Yes, but that's because the previous generation had so many children. In the meantime, however, the birth rate is falling dramatically in some cases. It has fallen by half in the Arab world in just one generation, from 7.5 children per woman in 1975 to 3.5 in 2005. The birth rate among female university graduates is just below 2.1, the level needed to maintain a population. Tunisia now has a birth rate similar to that of France. In Morocco, Algeria, Libya and Egypt, it has dropped below the magic threshold of three children per woman. This means that young adults constitute the majority of the population and, unlike their fathers and mothers, they can read and write, and they also practice contraception. But they suffer from unemployment and social frustration. It isn't surprising that unrest was inevitable in this part of world.

[...]

SPIEGEL: Why has it taken so long for the values of the modern age to reach the Islamic world? After all, the golden age of Arab civilization ended in the 13th century.

Todd: There is a simple explanation, which has the benefit of also being applicable to northern India and China, that is, to three completely differently religious communities: Islam, Hinduism and Confucianism. It has to do with the structure of the traditional family in these regions, with its debasement and with the disenfranchisement of women. And in Mesopotamia, for example, it extends well into the pre-Islamic world. Mohammed, the founder of Islam, granted women far more rights than they have had in most Arab societies to this day.

SPIEGEL: Does that mean that the Arabs conformed to older local circumstances and spread them across the entire Middle East?

Todd: Yes. The patrilinear, patrilocal system, in which only male succession is considered valid and newlyweds, preferably cousins in the ideal Arab marriage, live under the roof and authority of the father, inhibits all social progress. The disenfranchisement of women deprives them of the ability to raise their children in a progressive, dynamic fashion. Society calcifies and, in a sense, falls asleep. The powers of the individual cannot develop. The bourgeois achievement of marriage for love, and the free choice of one's partner, replaced the hierarchies of honor in Europe in the 19th century and reinforced the desire for freedom.

SPIEGEL: Is female emancipation the prerequisite for modernization in the Arab world?

Todd: It's in full swing. The headscarf debate is missing the point. The number of marriages between cousins is dropping just as spectacularly as the birth rate, thereby blasting away a barrier. The free individual or active citizen can enter the public arena. When more than 90 percent of young people can read and write and have a modicum of education, no traditional authoritarian regime will last for long. Have you noticed how many women are marching along in the protests? Even in Yemen, the most backward country in the Arab world, thousands of women were among the protesters.

SPIEGEL: The family is the private sphere par excellence. Why do changes in its structure necessarily spread to the political sphere?

Todd: The relationship between those at the top and those at the bottom is changing. When the authority of fathers begins to falter, political power generally collapses, as well. This is because the system of the patrilinear, endogamous extended family has been reproduced within the leadership of nations. The family patriarch as head of state places his sons and other male relatives in positions of power. Political dynasties develop, as in the case of the senior and junior Assad in Syria. Corruption flourishes because the clan runs things for its own benefit. The state is of course privatized as a family business. The power of obedience is based on a combination of loyalty, repression and political economics.

FAIRFAX, Va. (AP)
--
Maybe you've got a hunch Kim Jong Il's regime in North Korea has seen its
final days, or that the Ebola virus will re-emerge somewhere in the world in the
next year.

Your educated guess may be just as good as an expert's opinion. Statistics
have long shown that large crowds of average people frequently make better
predictions about unknown events, when their disparate guesses are averaged out,
than any individual scholar — a phenomenon known as the wisdom of crowds.

Now the nation's intelligence community, with the help of university
researchers and regular folks around the country, is studying ways to harness
and improve the wisdom of crowds. The research could one day arm policymakers
with information gathered by some of the same methods that power Wikipedia and
social media.

In a project that is part competition and part research study, George Mason
professors Charles Twardy and Kathryn Laskey are assembling a team on the
Internet of more than 500 forecasters who make educated guesses about a series
of world events, on everything from disease outbreaks to agricultural trends to
political patterns.

They are competing with four other teams led by professors at several
universities. Each differs in its approach, but all are studying how
crowdsourcing can be used.

At stake is grant money provided by the Intelligence Advanced Research
Projects Activity, part of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence,
which heads up the nation's intelligence community.

Put simply, crowdsourcing occurs when a task is assigned to a wide audience
rather than a specific expert or group of experts. The online encyclopedia
Wikipedia is one of the most prominent examples — anyone can write or edit an
entry. Over time, the crowds refine and improve the product. Crowdsourcing can
range from a simple question blasted to a person's Twitter followers to amateur
programmers fine-tuning open-source software.

IARPA spokeswoman Cherreka Montgomery said her project's goal is to develop
methods to refine and improve on crowdsourcing in a way that would be useful to
intelligence analysts.
"It's all about strengthening the capabilities of our intelligence analysts,"
Montgomery said.

And if analysts can use crowdsourcing to better determine the likelihood of
seemingly unpredictable world events, those analysts can help policymakers be
prepared and develop smarter responses. In a hypothetical example, a
crowd-powered prediction about the breakout of popular uprisings in the Middle
East could influence what goes in a dossier given to decision-makers at the
highest levels.

The program at George Mason is called DAGGRE, short for Decomposition-based
Aggregation. The researchers have used blog postings, Twitter and other means to
get the word out about their project to potential participants. No specialized
background is required, though a college degree is preferred.

The project seeks to break down various world events into their component
parts. The stability of Kim Jong Il's regime in North Korea provides an example.
One forecaster might base his prediction based solely on political factors. But
what if the political experts could be guided by health experts, who might
observe that Kim's medical condition is flagging?

The DAGGRE participants key their answers into forms on the project's
website, and also supply information at the outset about their education and what areas they
have expertise in. The scholars overseeing the project will then seek to break
down the variables that influence a forecaster's prediction, and use the data in
a way that people with disparate knowledge bases can help guide each other to
the most accurate forecast.

Military and intelligence researchers have long studied ways to improve the
ability to predict the future. In 2003, the Defense Advanced Research Projects
Agency launched research to see whether a terrorist attack could be predicted by
allowing speculative trading in a financial market, in which people would make
money on a futures contract if they bet on a terrorist attack occurring within a
designated time frame. The theory was that a spike in the market could serve as
a trip wire that an attack was under way. But some found the idea ghoulish, and
others objected to the notion that a terrorist could conceivably profit by
carrying out an attack, and the research was halted.

Laskey said George Mason's research bears some fundamental similarities with
the discontinued DARPA research, with the crucial difference that nobody
participating in George Mason's project can profit from making accurate
predictions. But participants who make accurate predictions are rewarded with a
point system, and there is a leaderboard of sorts for participants to measure
their success. Some can also choose to receive a small stipend for their time,
but it's not tied to how they answer questions.

Another team, led by psychologists at the University of California and the
University of Pennsylvania who are focused on asking questions in ways that
minimize experts' overconfidence and misjudgment, said Don Moore, a professor at
Cal-Berkeley.

"Small wording changes in a question can have a huge effect" on how a person
answers, Moore said.

Twardy said the George Mason study has already drawn more than 500
participants, but only about half are actively participating. The study
continues to recruit people as some participants drop out over the four-year
course of the study.

Participants come from all walks of life. While Twardy said he'd love to
have, say, agronomists, on his team to help forecast European polices and
responses to mad cow diseases and the cattle trade, the overriding principle is
that people from various backgrounds can contribute to the crowd's collective
wisdom, so participation is not restricted by fields of expertise.

George Mason received a $2.2 million grant from IARPA to conduct the study.
If the team remains in the competition for the full four years — weaker teams
are at risk of being discontinued — the grant will be increased to $8.2
million.

Twardy expects to publish the results of his research and hopes it will
ultimately help world leaders make more informed choices when they confront
global crises.

"At some level, you cannot predict the future," Twardy said. "But you can do
a lot better than just asking an expert."